Well that's a plain "ad hominem" argument right there sir. I found the post interesting and useful, and the fact that the author works for Google or Apple or Microsoft or Walmart doesn't affect it in the slightest.
He presents the post as if he was learning something new, when he's really a seasoned Dart expert which has access to resources most of us don't have. Then there's the background that he could cherry pick his project to make the outcome look good, and doing so is in fact his job.
A misleading presentation potentially leading people to false conclusions is worth calling out.
I picked the Music DNA app not because it makes Dart look good, but because I never really used Web Audio API before and the app looked good. If I really wanted to cherry pick, I wouldn't have picked an app that uses a third-party JS lib. The JS interop in Dart is sufficient, and it works, but obviously is not as seamless as it is in JavaScript. JS interop in JS is better than it is in Dart, and I didn't hide that.
I welcome anyone to pick a random JavaScript app, port it to Dart, and write up their experience. I'm sure the community would love to learn more about that experience, especially me.
I don't have access to anything you don't. Dart is open source. Heck, in my job, I don't even write Dart code every day. :)
I even reported issues about the original Music DNA app (bugs, code quality) to the original author. I helped make the original Music DNA app better.
He's not saying that you have false conclusions. He's saying that you have false pretenses. It appears as though you are new to the language, porting over some javascript code.
The truth is, you are not new to Dart at all. I believe he feels duped by you.
My personal problems with your post is that you go far too deep into the guts of how Dart works. 90% of your blog post is the internals of Dart as if you are writing the first few chapters of a Dart book. I would personally prefer it if you focused more on the specifics of the library you were porting over. That's what feels illegitimate to me when I read this article.
Thank you for calm and reasoned explanation. It's easy to address. Aaaaand, done, I added a little note at the top.
re: your personal feedback, thanks very much. The Music DNA app is pretty simple, there's not a lot of specific business logic there. It is a good example of Web Audio API, async, code organization, drag and drop. Are you saying you'd like a more detailed explanation of those APIs? I guess I assumed that web developers would read the post.
Honestly, I tried to work with Dart. I hit a few stumbling blocks during the tutorials. One difficulty was javascript interop. I also remember the drag and drop tutorials not working when I downloaded the code from github. It is really good that you covered those topics. Javascript interop in particular was a good choice. I can imagine a lot of developers may want to dip their feet in without migrating an entire project into Dart.
I think the post was a good writeup. I think that there is a void in Dart tutorials in general. It is incredibly easy to set up a standard Dart project. The idea of Futures are incredibly easy to follow. The code itself is very direct and easy to follow. The part that I always end up turning back on is when I try to integrate a real life project with Dart. I looked up the Angular port and found an incomplete tutorial. It gives me the feeling that others have not navigated that road before me, which in turn makes me wary to continue.
Perhaps a few blog posts that go heavy into the business logic of whatever app you decide to make would be more comforting. As a person who is on the fence, it would give me great comfort to see all the nuances of common CRUD apps blogged about. If you look at tutorials for Angular in javascript and are able to match those in Dart, I'll switch over.
